Housing Prices Roller Coaster

Here is another reason to love games (and editing as game play). It's a graph of US housing values from 1890 to present rendered within Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. Show someone a graph like this:

and you're likely to get a mild "wow." Show them the video and you get something more like "Whoa... that's scary." There's a world of difference.

That someone could do this-- take an existing game and use the in-game editing tools to create a message (tell a story!)-- elevates games as a medium to a new level. Dare I call this level... art? What is art, after all, but a means of stimulating the human mind? I don't think anyone would call the chart above "art." It's a visual representation of information. So, too, one could argue, is the Speculative Bubble roller coaster. Yet I maintain that one is art and the other is not.

My reasoning goes something like this:

art = things that are designed to stimulate the mind, "heart," or senses
Stories = art
books, movies, plays, etc = telling of stories (excluding textbooks, instructional videos, etc)
Speculative Bubble video = a movie which tells a story

You might ask what story the video tells. After all, a roller coaster at a theme park may have a theme but that doesn't mean it has a story. I think the story is this:

Beginning in 1890, housing prices were low. Over time they went up and down, trending generally up but never monotonically increasing. From time to time bad things happened that caused prices to decline steeply for a while, before eventually recovering their previous heights. The time between the start of WWI and the end of WWII was the worst decline, but even then there were localized ups and downs.

Then something happened.

In the mid '90s the rules seemed to change. Instead of mild ups and downs, prices shot up steeply. No downs. Just up up up. They've been going up higher and longer than at any other point in the last century. In fact, as you reach the end of the coaster (today), you can gaze back down into the valley and see that everything that has come before looks trivial. What were mildly thrilling ups and downs in the earlier ride seem completely flat now. The coaster is at an almost unimaginable height. It defies all reason to think that this height can be maintained. This can't last. It never has before...

Nail biter, no?

To be fair to our friendly chart, the narrative I lay out above is in there. The chart tells you everything you need to know. But you need to apply your own imagination to see it. The coaster movie shows you the story. The creator has applied his imagination to help you see things the way he sees them. "See! The world is like this!"

If that's not art then I don't know what is.